What did your dad say?

I was thinking about the story we read about Richard Rodriguez's childhood. At one point he was talking about how Spanish for him was his family's language. It was a special way for his family members to communicated with each other. It was something that they all had in common, something that bonded them together, something to belong to. This made me start thinking about my family. We speak English, and this obviously is not anything special that just our family does. I speak English with pretty much everyone that I know. My friends, classmates, and even strangers: I speak English to all of them. But there is still a certain uniqueness to the way that my family speaks. I realized this when I was on the phone with my dad last night. We were just talking about the most random things. The way that my dad says things is often quite different from the way most people would say them. About half the time when he tries to use a cliche of some kind, he mixes one or two together, and it comes out as some obscure phrase that no one has ever hear in his life. But, just because he is my dad and we are family, I understand perfectly what he is trying to communicate to me. It is part of our family language to know what these phrases mean. My dad also makes up words. Well, not completely makes up new words, he just changes words. Instead of saying, "Let's have some chips," my dad calls them chippies. If it's a hot summer day out and we are all going to go swimming in the lake, my dad will say, "Let's put our swimmies on." If I have a friend over and they hear this, they just look at me with this puzzled look on her face. Once I translate this family language to my friend the confused face is gone, but I can still tell that it is weird for her. It is just something different for my friends, just because they do not speak my family's special language.